Hip Chick, Cool Cat

Artist Sara Varon talks about her first children’s book—a sweet wordless wonder

By Rick Margolis -- School Library Journal, 5/1/2006

Chicken and Cat is a good-hearted tale of two friends—a chicken who lives in New York City and a country cat who pays him a visit. Is the story autobiographical?

It’s totally autobiographical. The story not only takes place in my Brooklyn neighborhood, that’s my subway station that they go to, and Chicken lives in my building. Actually, it’s my street number, but I drew a building down the street that I always wished I lived in. When I started the book, there was an empty lot across the street from me. So that’s what Chicken and Cat are looking at. But now it’s luxury high-rise condos. At the beginning, I thought it was a story about me and my friend Sheila, who comes to visit a lot from Chicago, which is where I’m from. I thought she was the chicken, and I was the cat. She’s a really good friend of mine, and our friendship was the basis for the two characters.

A lot of artists sneak personal references into their books. Did you do that?

Oh yeah. I love to put my friends in there. So there’s a bookstore, “Sheila’s Secondhand Books,” for my friend Sheila. And a hardware store, “George’s Hardware Ferreteria,” for my friend George. There’s a little record store and all the posters in the window were records that I was listening to, like Aimee Mann’s Lost in Space, Air’s Talkie Walkie, and Sufjan Stevens’s Greetings from Michigan. They were in heavy rotation at the time. Oh, and you know what? There’s a picture where Chicken and Cat are buying seeds at the hardware store and there’s a person coming into the store. That’s supposed to be me, and I’m wearing a T-shirt with a dog on it.

Did you originally set out to create a story without words?

The story did originally have words. The way I told it was very different, and the layout was very different than the final version. Instead of Chicken and Cat going places in the city, they went camping. It was pretty rocky in the beginning, developing a story that my editor, Jennifer Rees, and I could both agree on. It took a really long time, and we were just spinning our wheels. Then all of a sudden, we took a long break, and I just knew what to do.

What happened?

I was doing a lot of comics in the year or so that I took off, and I got a lot better at telling stories and developing my own style. So it was just a question of timing.

I heard that when you attended the School for the Visual Arts, your classmates told you to add sex and violence to your work.

There’s an artist named Mark Ryden and another one named Camille Rose Garcia. They do awesome stuff. But their stuff is kind of cute and creepy, and that was definitely popular. It seemed to be what everyone in my class was looking at four or five years ago. And they were telling me, “Your stuff is so cute. It would be perfect if you put violence in it.” But I didn’t want to.

Why not?

Because I feel like the characters are my friends, and I don’t want bad things to happen to them. I think that’s kind of silly, but….

Will there be more adventures of Chicken and Cat?

There’s going to definitely be one more, which I’m very excited about. Right now, we don’t have the story. But this guy at my gym is a garbage man, and he said he would take me out on his route. So I was going to take photos, and I thought maybe the next installment would be a garbage-truck story. I better hurry up before the weather turns warm and the garbage gets too smelly.